Users in GA4

In the broadest sense, a “User” is a person.  In a narrower, more annoying sense, a “User” is an unique ID saved as a cookie or as a collection of identifiable characteristics of a person. You also have the ability to set your own user_id using a login or other first-party identifiers. 

Users are the highest level of identification of the GA4 structure, and every thing done on the site is ultimately bubbled back to the User.

There are four types of Users you need to be familiar with:

1. Total Users - literally a count of all users who came to your site in the date range you chose. It’s not that deep.

2. Active Users - a count of users that engaged with your site in the date range you chose. 

3. New Users - a count of users that visited your site for the first time in the date range you chose

4. Returning Users - a count of users that visited your site for the first time before the date range you chose. 

New & Returning Users are the only ones that are mutually exclusive. A single person can be counted as New, Active, AND Total.  These are simply characteristics of a User. If you want to compare Total Users and Active Users, keep in mind that Actives are subset of Total.

What is an Active User and why should I care?

Let’s take a second to define Active Users a little more closely, but not in a dumb technical way. An Active User has engaged with your site. “Engaged” means they accomplished at least one of three specific actions:

1. Viewed a second page after the Landing Page

2. Spent longer than 10 seconds with your site in view in their browsers (i.e. not open in a tab in the background)

3. Completed a Key Event (more about that later)

Analyzing these Losers (aka non-engages) is a completely separate analysis. Separating real Users from the Losers  gives you a better idea of what users are doing on your site without having skewed metrics.

Ok so, why should I care about New or Returning Users?

It’s more than people coming back to your website.  Yes, that’s part of it because people rarely convert right away. These user values are also used to determine Lifetime Value, Frequency, and Recency of your visitors. It gives you a deeper understanding of your user journey.

TIP: When looking to actually improve or audit the user experience, always perform separate analyses for Active Users and Total Users.

So what do I do next?

Here are some ideas:

1. Which of your landing pages has the lowest engagement rates? Look for ways to entice users to do more when they first enter a page.

2. Look at your dropoff for your users. How often do they come back? What does it look like for each Landing Page?  Set up a remarketing campaign for page-specific visitors.

3. Create an audience! Use the Audience settings to start measuring “Users that visit page XYZ and then Purchase”. Once you’ve built up enough individual Users, Google Analytics can start extrapolating other user characteristics for a Google Ads campaign that can find similar prospects who are likely to buy.

Ok, but what else?

If you have a site or an app that requires a login, that’s an entirely different ballgame. You can work with a developer to use Google Analytics “user_id” setting and populate that value with a unique identifier from your website. Just pretty please don’t use anything personally identifiable like email, phone number, name, or face tattoos.

Once you get a handle on what makes a User, then dive into the First User Acquisition Reports.